Camp Pleasant (2 page)

“Up,” I said to Bob, “and at them.”

“Forward my remains to mother,” his muffled voice came filtering through the blankets.

“How soon is breakfast?” I asked Mack.

“Half hour after reveille,” he said. I nodded, then looked over again at the comatose mound that was Bob Dalrymple.

“Come on,” I told him.

Bob drew back the covers from his sleep-numbed features. “Behold,” he said, “the face of death.”

“Okay, jerk!” Mack said loudly, “hit the deck!” He grabbed the bedclothes and dragged Bob off the edge of the bunk. Bob hit the deck on three points, his outraged curse bounding off the cabin walls. Mack grabbed his toilet kit and left while Bob half-sat, half-lay on the floor, looking dizzy.

“Ain’t he sweet?” he said.

“Get dressed,” I told him.

Twenty minutes later, we were approaching the front of the dining hall where a cluster of men stood, two of them middle-aged, the rest in their early twenties. I recognized “Doc” Rainey, the assistant camp director who had hired me in the city; but the rest of the group, except for Mack and Sid Goldberg, were strangers.

“Nolan here?” I asked Bob as we crossed the log bridge.

“Uh-uh. He’s probably in the kitchen stuffing his gut with bacon.”

“You really go for him, don’t you?” I said.

“Wait,” was all he answered.

We reached the group and Doc shook my hand, then introduced me to the others. There was Jack Stauffer, the bulky water-front director, old Barney Wright who headed field athletics, Mick Curleman who ran the craft shop; plus an assortment of cabin counselors, each of whom worked on the waterfront, the athletic fields or the craft shop.

While we were standing there, a tall bony man in his early thirties came walking around the edge of the dining hall and joined us. He was wearing a tee-shirt and very abbreviated shorts which revealed two long, skinny legs ending in tennis shoes.

“Matt, this is Merv Loomis,” Bob introduced him. “He’s in charge of hikes.”

“I’m delighted,” he said when Bob told him I was going to be the music director. “Culture in this camp, with all due respect to the effortsof our esteemed dramatics director—” he bowed to Bob—”has, in the past, been largely confined to horseshoes and butterfly mounting.”

It was easy to see why Mack thought what he did about Merv—Merv with his gaunt, patrician face, his close brush cut, his immaculate use of words. I liked him though.

“I’m afraid you’ll find your job fast assuming the proportions of an epic venture,” Merv said when I told him of my hopes of forming the glee club among the boys. “The little reptiles would sooner cut their throats than sing a song.”

The door was opened then by one of the kitchen help and we filed into the dim coolness of the dining hall.

There was a young woman sitting at the large table. She smiled at all of us as we approached, our footsteps echoing in the great room. I heard some of the counselors call her Ellen and Doc Rainey said, “Good morning, my dear,” to her.

“Who’s she?” I whispered to Merv as he sat down between Bob and myself.

“Ellen Nolan,” he said.

“His daughter?”

“No, dear boy,” Merv said, amusedly, “his wife.”

I confess to a frank staring at her. Since I’d first heard of Ed Nolan, I’d thought of him as a middle-aged man. Certainly, Bob’s descriptions of him had done nothing to alter that idea.

Ellen Nolan couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one, I thought. She was a frail-looking woman, a little pale, her eyes brown and very large. Thick, auburn hair fell to her shoulders, drawn and ribboned behind her small ears. Her lips, as she smiled, were thin and had no lipstick. She was wearing a cotton dress, white with green squares on it and, from what I could see of her figure, it was as slight and fragile as her face. She was almost an opposite to Julia, the thought occurred painfully. Julia, tall, blonde, Amazonian.

I tried not to think about her but I couldn’t help it.

We were breaking open our cereal boxes when Bob said, “Here comes Big Ed.”

I looked up, curious, to see that my original conception of Ed Nolan was quite accurate. He was middle-aged, semi-bald, a great hulk of a man squeaking over the floorboards like an ape in sneakers, his face broad and red-flushed behind rimless glasses, the contour of his thick- lipped mouth broken by the dark jutting of an unlit, half-smoked cigar.

A general murmur of “Hi ya, Ed,” went up from the counselors and he raised one paw of a hand in greeting, not the remotest flicker of change on his face. He sank down heavily in the chair beside his wife’s and I saw her wince as he, quite obviously, pinched her under the table. He plucked the cigar from his mouth, laid it beside his plate, quaffed down orange juice in a swallow and refilled his glass to the brim.

“Ed is hungry,” Bob murmured beneath the general chatter of conversation at the table. “He’s probably had ten or eleven rashers of bacon and a few dozen eggs.”

While we ate I looked over at Nolan. He was wolfing down cereal, his cheeks bulging with spoonfuls of it, heavily sugared. I noticed the small hole in his tee-shirt through which protruded tufts of black hair. Directly under his large pectorals began the downward bulge of his belly. I glanced at his wife. She seemed so out of place next to Nolan; like a fawn coupled to a grizzly bear. Once, she looked up before I could glance away and, for an instant, I unable to take my eyes from hers. She smiled a little at me and I felt a shudder run down my back as I reached for the newly brought plate of scrambled eggs.

In the middle of eggs and toast Nolan rose and stood silently until the noise had abated and the eating ceased. Then he picked the cigar from his mouth and spoke.

“Some of you have been with me before,” he said. “Some of you are here for the first time. But remember this—all of you. No matter if you’re new here or you know the ropes—I expect good work from you. You’re being paid for it and that’s the way I want my camp run.”

While Ed Nolan talked, I looked at his wife. She was staring at the table and there was a look of strange, bleak emptiness in her eyes.

Directly after breakfast, Bob and I retired to the fields to scythe until the ground was thick with mown grass, the air heavy with the hot smell of sap and pollen dust. We worked under an over blast of sunlight, the salty taste of sweat in our mouths. I hadn’t done manual labor since the army and that morning did me in. By ten I had to handkerchief my right hand to protect the blisters. By eleven I was starting to burn and had to put my tee-shirt back on; by twelve the burning ache had penetrated to my muscles. I sat stiff and miserable at lunch, downing nevertheless, a gigantic meal.

Happily, lunch was followed by an hour’s rest period, a regular feature of Camp Pleasant’s schedule. I slept heavily and motionlessly on the cabin bunk until Bob shook me back to consciousness. Groggy with sleep, I trudged back to the fields again for an afternoon of gathering up the cut grass and stuffing it into sacks which we tossed on the truck so Sid Goldberg could drive them to the giant incinerator.

At four-thirty, Big Ed pronounced the lake open. I wanted to head for my bunk and sleep again but Bob managed to talk me out of it. I wasglad he did. The lake was barely cool and it soothed my muscles to feel the water stroking them.

Supper was at five-thirty. Ellen Nolan wasn’t there. When I asked Bob about it he said that there was a kitchen in the Nolan’s cabin and, sometimes, Ellen Nolan ate there instead of going to the dining hall.

The meal was interrupted at mid-point by another Nolan speech. He told us that we had only three days to get the camp into “topnotch” shape and if we didn’t “get into high gear” he’d have to take away our swimming time and cut the rest period in half. The camp, he said, had always been in “topnotch” shape on opening day and, by God, he was going to see to it that it was this year too.

When Big Ed had finished, we returned to our cold supper and finished it. Afterward, Bob, Merv and I took the half-mile walk up the road to the small grocery store. There, we sat on the porch, sipping Cokes, Merv smoking his slender pipe, Bob a cigarette.

“Does he always give speeches?” I asked.

“Incessantly,” Bob said.

“How bad is he really?” I asked.

“He represents,” Merv said, “all that is dismaying in the world. His insensibility to the feeling of others is shocking. His crushing approach to human relations is hideous.”

“You make him sound like Hitler,” I said.

“In his own oafish way,” Merv said, “Ed Nolan has reduced Camp Pleasant to a microcosm of the Third Reich.”

“Why do you stand for it?” I asked. “Why do the kids’ parents stand for it?”

“To answer the first question,” Merv answered, “Bob and I come here because we like the camp and the country. I worked in this camp years before Nolan came and I’m certainly not going to let him keep mefrom my summer here which I enjoy. As to opposing him, however, this is tantamount to an attempt to bash in the side of a tank with a daisy. Nolan has the support of the parents for the simple reason that they don’t know about him. Kids don’t talk about discipline unless it’s fresh in their minds or done to crushing excess. Ed knows the limits. He always slacks off around visiting day and toward the end of each camping period.”

“Then he’s not dumb,” I said.

“Oh no, he has great animal cunning,” Merv conceded, “which is, precisely, what makes him so dangerous.”

I put down my empty Coke bottle.

“Looks like I’m in for a grand summer,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Bob said. “Just stay out of his way and he won’t even notice you.

I tried to console myself with that.

In the evenings, the Nolan’s cabin was open house to Camp Pleasant personnel. There was a record player, current magazines, checker, chess and card games and a screened-in porch of wicker chairs where one could sit and gaze at the night-shrouded lake.

I wanted to go to bed but Bob talked me into a game of chess before sacking out. So, after returning from the grocery store, we started for the Nolan cabin, Merv leaving us with the statement that he had some reading to do.

“He doesn’t ever go to Ed’s cabin,” Bob said. “There’s a lot of tension between them. Ed hates him, I think. He’s been trying to oust Merv for years but Merv is almost an institution in the camp and the only one who knows the surrounding country well enough to-organize hikes.” Bob shook his head. “Ed keeps looking for some excuse to get rid of Merv. Maybe some day he’ll find one.”

We walked along the trail past the wooden-floored tent where Sid Goldberg, Barney Wright and the heads of the Junior and Intermediate sections lived. Sid was sitting on the small porch, his legs propped up on the railing. He greeted us and we said hello as we passed.

“He seems like a nice fella,” Bob said, “even if he is a dirty kike.”

“Mack been at you too?” I asked.

“Yowza.” Bob pointed to a little cabin in a patch of trees. “That’s where Jack Stauffer and his wife live,” he said. “Doc Rainey used to live there but he let Jack have it last year after Jack got married. Doc lives in a little tent by the water. He’s a good guy, Doc. He should be head of the camp.”

The trail turned left now and I saw, at its foot, a moderately sized log cabin with yellow curtains in the windows.

“There’s Ellen Nolan in the kitchen,” Bob said and I saw her pass before the window.

“She’s a pretty girl,” I said.

“You think so?” Bob asked, sounding surprised. “I never thought of her that way. She’s always seemed like, oh, I don’t know. Just Big Ed’s wife, I guess.”

We reached the house and Bob pulled open a groaning screen door. Ellen Nolan, standing at the sink, looked around.

“Hi, Ellen,” Bob said and she smiled. “You haven’t met Matt Harper, have you?”

“No, I haven’t, Bob,” Ellen said.

We smiled at each other.

“Ed tells me you’re going to be our music director,” she said.

“Yes.” I nodded, thinking again how incredible it seemed that she was Ed Nolan’s wife.

“That’s wonderful,” she said. Her brown eyes met mine as I heard Bob saying that we’d come down for a game of chess.

Ed Nolan was in the living room, talking sports with two of the athletic counselors.

“—play
hard
ball,
fast
ball.” We got in on the tail end of his speech. “Teach ‘em to
win
, not to lose. I don’t go for this defeatist stuff, it makes a kid think in terms of winning or losing. If that’s sportsmanship, you can have it.” He glanced aside at us, then went on. “You teach a kid how to
win
] that’s the American way. Play hard, play fast and
win
!
”

He finished, his face reflecting satisfaction with his philosophy as he turned to us. He nodded curtly at Bob, extended his beefy hand to me.

“Haven’t had a chance to talk to you man-to-man, Harper,” he said. “Glad you dropped by, boy.”

His bullish handshake sent needles of cutting fire into the raw flesh under my broken blisters and I couldn’t keep the grimace from my face.

“What’s wrong, boy?” he asked bluffly. “Too rough for ya?”

I told him it was blistered and he laughed. “Y’need a little toughenin’ up,” he said. “A summer’s hard work’ll do ya good. Sit down, boy, sit down.”

“Could I get a drink of water first?” I asked, and he shrugged and pointed in the general direction of the kitchen. As I headed for it, I wondered why I’d said that. I wasn’t thirsty at all. Maybe, I thought, I just wanted to get away from Nolan; or maybe I wanted to see Ellen Nolan again.

She was still at the sink, finishing up the dishes. She looked up with a friendly smile as I came in.

“May I get a drink?” I asked.

“Of course.” She gestured toward a cupboard-with her hand. “The glasses are up there.”

As I stood close to her, running faucet water into the glass, I noticed, from the corners of my eyes, her looking at me. I turned to face her and she smiled quickly.

“Did your hands blister badly today?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Let me see,” she said. She held my hand in her warm palm. “Oh, that looks terrible,” she said concernedly. “You should have it treated.”